Originally Published PMPN January 2005
Brand Matters
The Language of Color
Is there any firm basis to selecting colors for specific geographies?
Robert C. Sprung and Christian Wichmann, TippingSprung LLC
 |
| Robert C. Sprung |
Color choice is increasingly critical in distinguishing the branding of medical products—think of Viagra’s blue or Nexium’s purple. As our products are sold internationally, we must ask whether the colors we are choosing are effective and inoffensive in our target markets. (The Brand Matters column on page 26 of the September 2004 PMP News dealt with the legal protectability of color and scent; here, we focus on color as a brand enhancer.)
Most of us have heard horror stories about color selection abroad—for example, that “white is the color of death in China.” But a little knowledge is particularly dangerous here—some of these stories are misleading or wrong. Packaging professionals should delve deeper into color selection for international markets, since so much of their company’s revenue and prestige rides on these decisions.
First, colors often do have distinct associations in different countries. In much of the West, red connotes anger or danger—the global list of such associations would cover many pages.
Since color is used as a design element in every society, a single color, out of context, may well lose much of that elemental significance. However, certain color combinations are much less ambiguous. The combination of white and red, for example, is associated with weddings and celebrations in Japan, while black and white together is associated with funerals (we are told by a Japanese marketer that one avoids printing logos in black and white in Japan for this reason). In Japan, gray is strongly associated with condolence cards. This by itself hardly makes gray off-limits, but one can imagine a context where it suddenly becomes inappropriate (e.g., the name of a product, written in a cursive script reminiscent of handwriting, used to advertise a pharmaceutical that treats a serious condition).
Perhaps the strongest regional color associations are flags and other national colors. One should be especially careful in regions of the world with strong national rivalry or animosity (e.g., the two factions in the Irish conflict are strongly associated with green and orange). Some companies have played this to their advantage—witness home-furnishing retailer Ikea’s yellow and blue, the Swedish national colors. America’s red, white, and blue are ubiquitous, but in today’s troubled world, those colors may not play well, or not imply a truly international approach.
Beyond such fixed color associations, there is an ever-changing cultural backdrop that effects how colors are perceived. Purple, traditionally the color of nobility in Japan, has today become associated with the punk youth culture, and presents a strongly negative image in certain market segments. UPS has practically based its identity on the color brown—and has somehow managed to keep its trademark uniforms in Germany (where brown shirts still have a sinister connotation from the Nazi years).
Certain color associations are particularly strong in the healthcare field. In Japan, for example, yellow is associated with mental illness (and it is the color of certain ambulances).
Despite all these caveats, one can counter that branding is all about standing apart. UPS “owns” brown and T-Mobile, magenta; just as Tiffany is strongly associated with “Tiffany blue.” The branding world is filled with stories of companies that broke the mold, and laid claim to a color not staked out by the competition. As the rest of the world emulates the U.S. trend in coloring pills, we would hazard a guess that old color associations might cave in sooner than manufacturers would start manufacturing pills of different colors for each target market.
The lesson of all this: there is no simple color map or decision tree to determine which colors work or don’t work in a given market. However, these color issues are very real, and there is no substitute for natives testing them in a structured manner in your target markets. A final word of advice: take the input of a single person with a grain of salt; for decisions on products with wide distribution, ensure that you have good data from a wide range of consumers, polled in a scientifically robust manner.
Robert Sprung has been active in translation for more than a decade. He can be reached at robert@tippingsprung.com. TippingSprung (New York City) offers translation and branding services with a focus on the needs of life sciences companies. Visit the company’s Web site at www.tippingsprung.com.
Copyright ©2005 Pharmaceutical & Medical Packaging News
